Comment by JKCalhoun 4 days ago
Consider the contraposition.
• Poor people live shorter, unhealthier lives.
• Without a college degree, your employment options are diminished.
It's fine to trash "handing out money" or "pushing more people through college" but then what is left is: there's nothing we can do for poor people.
Construction, a few trades… Help me, I've run out of ideas without resorting to "Walmart Greeter".
Most of those jobs went overseas a long time ago. Short of the couple I could think of, the rest of the jobs remaining that don't require some advanced education don't pay a "living wage".
I'd love to see the US have a vocational "track" beginning in high school again. But that also requires we have the jobs for them when they graduate.
If you've ever worked at a random Fortune 500 company and looked around the office at people whose pinned apps are "Outlook, Powerpoint, Excel", those are jobs that can easily be done if you're moderately smart and learn a few things on the job. You have a reasonably well-defined set of goals, projects, and meetings, and you just have to talk to other people and move numbers around in Excel, then put them into Powerpoint and set up meetings in Outlook to discuss. There are millions of these jobs, and you can get extremely senior once you just learn the business of your company (which would never be taught in college). You don't need a college degree for these. A friend of mine is a senior executive at a large insurance company and does just fine at their job with no degree. Given, they got into that job decades ago when degrees weren't required, and worked their way up, but the same could be done now if employers let people be hired based not on degree but on an apprenticeship or similar trial period.
Employers would let people be hired but any sort of employer based assessment opens the company up to accusations of discrimination. This was litigated. Many companies got in trouble decades ago. And then all companies turned to college degrees and the American consumer was fleeced for good
> Construction, a few trades… Help me, I've run out of ideas without resorting to "Walmart Greeter".
I don’t think you’re trying hard enough.
- bookkeeper
- billing (esp. medical)
- data entry
- admin assistant
- inventory management
- basic tax filing
- content manager (for websites and social media)
- scheduling
- basic account management
- tons of stuff in supply chain
I could go on…
Most office work. Finance. Insurance. Mortgage sales. Blue collar jobs. Inspection and compliance. Program management, project management, graphics design, marketing. A lot of software work that doesn't require proof based mathematics (most of it). Your lack of lateral thinking is not an argument.
Unless my kid was interested in a professorship or the hard sciences or a hard science aspect of engineering work or a specific certificate (architect), I would not encourage college. Seems like a waste of money making years. It can make sense if you're a first generation college person and you were not raised well off, but most people here are in the upper income brackets, so adopting the culture of the upper class is not really something they'd need to do
That might have worked if we had established that right after WWII, but it would never get off the ground now. The current system is too entrenched.
Of course there is. You can just hire them and train them. Most positions don't require college degrees. Everything you need to know for most jobs you learned in high school. At most you need a certificate program of some kind.